Inheriting family trauma

It's probably common knowledge that we inherit genetic traits from our parents. It might be lesser known that the effects of trauma are likely to flow down the proverbial bloodline as well. In his book It Didn't Start With You, Mark Wolynn introduces terms like "family mind" and "family consciousness" to help readers understand how a relative's past experiences can affect a child who hasn't necessarily endured the same things.

(The following points are iterations from Wolynn's work.)

The Family Mind

"The parents eat sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge" Ezekiel 18:2.

Chances are, if there's some sort of trauma or emotional deficit in your bloodline that hasn't been acknowledged, addressed, or repaired, it's trickled down to you.

Both of my parents experienced abandonment during childhood. While neither of them abandoned me, I likely have inherited a certain kind of emptiness due to what they lost early in their lives.

The Family Consciousness

"Traumatic events...can exert a powerful influence over us, leaving an imprint on our entire family system for generations. These imprints then become the family blueprint as family members unconsciously repeat the sufferings of the past" (p. 44). 

"Unresolved traumas from our family history spill into successive generations, blending into our emotions, reactions, and choices in ways we never think to question. We assume these experiences originate with us" (p. 58).

“The greater truth would be that the love you longed for was not available for your mother to give” (p. 68).

“Until we uncover the actual triggering event in our family history, we can relive fears and feelings that don’t belong to us—unconscious fragments of a trauma—and we will think they’re ours” (p. 77).

Because of things that have happened to your parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and so on, you might have an inner dialogue or interpersonal expectations based on events that didn't necessarily take place in your life. Gaps don't fill themselves, you know? And people normally can't give what they never received. I can't teach you Russian grammar because I've never learned Russian grammar. Input; output. Because of what your predecessors were missing, those things might be missing from you too. When we do notice that something is missing, the emptiness may be hard to identify. Maybe we feel like something's wrong with us because there's a hole we aren't equipped to understand. One way to help fill this hole is through obtaining knowledge of our family history. I may not be able to teach you Russian grammar at the moment, but I'm positive I could. I just have to equip myself first. One mode of equipment in terms of balancing emotional deficit is therapy. It can be helpful when a properly equipped, objective third party gives us a knowledge-based mirror to show us what we have essentially been blind to.

My mother and my mother's mother were significantly undermothered. Because of this, my own relationship with my mom was void of emotional connection. The only time she vocalized "seeing" me was when she was disappointed. She didn't have much to be disappointed in to be honest because I was a good kid, but boy did she magnify anything she could find. She loved to put words and doubts in my mouth, insisting that anything I wanted to do was stupid and outside of my ability. That attitude had an origin. Her mother had a destructive you-can't attitude as well. I don't know how long that's been in the family or where it came from, but I do know that it sucks when your mother doesn't believe in you.

I've felt this dissonance between myself and my mother since I was very young. That relationship has brought me more pain than warmth, and a few years ago I put a calculated distance between us. (Recall my post about attachment styles, mine being insecure avoidant.) With distance, I've been able to read about and reflect on the relationship we had. With the information I'm learning, I'm able to draw from the past and identify which pieces of a healthy mother-daughter relationship were missing.
(More on this in a later post. I want to stay on track here.)

Four Unconscious Themes that interrupt the flow of life:

1. We have merged with the feelings of a parent.
2. We have judged, blamed, rejected or cut off from a parent.
3. We have experienced a break in the early bond with our mother.
4. We have identified with an excluded member of our family system.

There's so much content on YouTube and other media that features Wolynn himself talking about his writing, his experiences, and what he hopes the world will gain from his work. My posts are normally overflowing with my reflections and elaborations, but I think collecting a few of his words verbatim is the most effective way to share this information with you. If you're interested in more of what Wolynn has to say, I encourage you to dive straight in to the abundance of sources available on the internet.

If you'd like an unprofessional but friendly outsider to talk to, the contact box on the right is for you. :) Sometimes we feel like nobody is rooting for us, but I want to try to help you however I can.

Enjoy this lovely spring evening, friends! Stay well.